At Random for June 12, 2009

• By DANNY HEITMAN
• Advocate columnist
• Published: Jun 12, 2009 - Page: 1D

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It was a lovely spring evening several weeks ago when friends and family gathered to induct Laurie Smith Anderson into LSU’s Manship School of Mass Communication Hall of Fame.

There was wine and cheese on the school’s patio, lively talk, then a moving indoor ceremony honoring Laurie’s work as an Advocate reporter and columnist.

The only sore spot was the physical absence of Laurie, who had written an eloquent series of columns about her struggle with cancer before the disease took her life in 2007.

But Laurie seemed very much with us as some of her sentences sounded through the audience during a video tribute. They are included in a book, “The Patient Person,” that seems as alive to me each time I read it as Laurie ever was.

I have the book open to page 83, where Laurie writes of how illness can reshape priorities:

“By letting go of a lot of things that I realize were unimportant, I’ve given myself more time to enjoy the things that do matter to me. I’m surprised at how simple most of them are.

“In a morning walk, I check out the satsumas, still green on their trees in the orchard.

“I slip quietly onto the screened porch overlooking the pond so as not to frighten away the great blue heron.

“I stretch out on the hammock with a good book, eventually falling asleep to the hum of a box fan . . .”

In “Our Town,” the celebrated play by Thornton Wilder, the departed residents of a small New England town sit serenely in the local cemetery, continuing to comment on the community that wrongly believes they are gone.

I’ve often thought that the departed writers on my bookshelf are very much like the people in Thornton’s afterlife. The words of Mark Twain and Eudora Welty, Michel de Montaigne and Marcus Aurelius, John Steinbeck and even Laurie still offer keen insights on the moment, which makes me think of Twain’s comic quote that reports of his death were greatly exaggerated.

John Updike, one of my favorite writers, died not long ago, but he’s back before the reading public again in “Endpoint,” a posthumous collection of his poems.

Although he was critically acclaimed and widely popular, Updike had occasional doubts about the worth of his occupation.